81–90 of 272 posts
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Valve knows how many times you launch a game, how much time you spend in a game, who your friends are, your spending habits...
How many games are exclusive to Steam and how many games are exclusive to windows?
I fully agree with the complaints, but I never understood why this outrage doesn't happen about e.g. Gmail (or all of ChromeOS for that matter). Lots of people virtually live in Google Apps, which certainly does a lot more tracking than Windows 10 does. The argument that "it's OK because it's on the web" just doesn't cut it anymore guys. An application is an application. We should just be as angry about browsers that…
It is when you change it to an individual level that it becomes problematic. Instead of talking about what is happening with a product across all users, you are now talking about what a specific person is doing. And that is why tracking at the OS level is more problematic than at a web server level - by definition, my OS is personal usage.
Let's start gathering statistics on how many times people open their refrigerator, or use the toilet, or take a shower. What's more concerning about these data aren't these specific numbers, but what other data that implies that they have, what they can do with it, and what they can infer about you from it. Privacy and anonymity aren't (reasonably) possible on a Windows 10 operating system. Any entity knowing that I…
> Let's start gathering statistics on how many times people open their refrigerator, or use the toilet, or take a shower. Just think of the targeted advertising opportunities based on toilet usage statistics!
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They do offer those options. People would just rather complain that the free upgrade they got doesn't have features they want - but apparently not enough to actually pay for them.
I assume you mean the Enterprise version? Last time I checked that wasn't something individual consumers can just go out and buy. But regardless of that, from Microsoft's perspective, does it make any sense to not offer the option to disable telemetry on all versions? From what I see, all it's doing is giving them bad publicity while driving potential users away to other platforms. And for what? Probably a few basis…
What software dev doesn't think logs and crash dumps are useful?
I spent my holiday break shifting my alignment 2 or 3 points towards Stallmanism. The existence/collection of statistics like this increase my confidence in that choice. Between Windows privacy craziness and Apple's continuing lockdown of OSX (I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX), I recently switched all of my OSX/Windows/Ubuntu systems to Arch Linux; it takes some…
Complain about the feature all you want, but pretending that it's not well documented or configurable is just silly. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208(v=vs.85...
While the Enhanced level accounts for a lot of the usage-specific statistics detailed in TFA, Basic still sends a lot of valuable data to Microsoft. And, despite paying for Windows, you can't turn it off unless you get an Enterprise/Academic license.
[0]: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208(v=vs.85...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume you mean the Enterprise version? Last time I checked that wasn't something individual consumers can just go out and buy. But regardless of that, from Microsoft's perspective, does it make any sense to not offer the option to disable telemetry on all versions? From what I see, all it's doing is giving them bad publicity while driving potential users away to other platforms. And for what? Probably a few basis…
Because telemetry is a key tool used to improve quality. What software dev doesn't think logs and crash dumps are useful?
It's just creepy and invasive.
I spent my holiday break shifting my alignment 2 or 3 points towards Stallmanism. The existence/collection of statistics like this increase my confidence in that choice. Between Windows privacy craziness and Apple's continuing lockdown of OSX (I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX), I recently switched all of my OSX/Windows/Ubuntu systems to Arch Linux; it takes some…
I went the other way around. I started with your conclusions and have been migrating to the Apple ecosystem and am tempted to move to Windows. I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution. While the privacy collection issues should be addressed and be transparent to end-users I think open source is not the way to go for these devices. I'm tired of each device being…
Open-source is pretty young on the desktop arena. Consider that Microsoft ruled the entire nineties and tried all tricks in the book to sabotage linux. Despite this, the fact that linux desktops are even available today is nothing short of a miracle! IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enough to handle 90% of users' needs, the only exception is gaming but that gap is also rapidly getting filled.
> It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers.
Consider that the OS that powers all kinds of devices from satellites to embedded devices is Linux, an open-source project where payment isn't a top-priority for developers, but merit is!
> And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption.
All endeavors are like that, not just software projects. More the user participation, better the product focus and development.
> I don't like the spyware "features," but I don't think I'll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I've come to depend on.
Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux. Unless you are heavily dependent of Microsoft Excel worksheets and their arcane proprietary macros, I don't see a reason not to switch (besides just being lethargic to learn something new).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume you mean the Enterprise version? Last time I checked that wasn't something individual consumers can just go out and buy. But regardless of that, from Microsoft's perspective, does it make any sense to not offer the option to disable telemetry on all versions? From what I see, all it's doing is giving them bad publicity while driving potential users away to other platforms. And for what? Probably a few basis…
Because telemetry is a key tool used to improve quality. What software dev doesn't think logs and crash dumps are useful?
That intersection of users seems absolutely miniscule relative to the overall Windows 10 userbase, and in most cases the telemetry data they contribute is not going to be any larger than a margin of error in Microsoft's Windows 10 overall telemetry trends.
Nobody is going to argue that telemetry isn't useful for developers, but at some point you have to decide if it's worth it to force users into giving you telemetry data if it means driving potential users away to competitors and giving fuel to a very vocal minority of users that write unfavorable articles and comments on news sites, blogs, and social media at every opportunity because of this decision.
This is the one that worries me -- "More than four billion hours spent playing PC games" Tracking usage in Microsoft's own software is one thing. But for the OS to understand which 3rd party apps are games, and track hours spent on them has some deeper implications.